A canvass of the area would have told them that the church had already sent a message to those neighbors when it had stood silent in the face of atrocity. Those neighbors now had no interest in bailing out a congregation with a ministry too cowardly to speak up for righteousness when it had seemed too costly to do so.

As of this week, the nation faces a crazier election season than many of us ever imagined, with Donald J. Trump as the all-but-certain nominee of the Republican Party. Regardless of the outcome in November, his campaign is forcing American Christians to grapple with some scary realities that will have implications for years to come.

This election has cast light on the darkness of pent-up nativism and bigotry all over the country. There are not-so-coded messages denouncing African-Americans and immigrants; concern about racial justice and national unity is ridiculed as "political correctness." Religious minorities are scapegoated for the sins of others, with basic religious freedoms for them called into question. Many of those who have criticized Mr. Trump's vision for America have faced threats and intimidation from the "alt-right" of white supremacists and nativists who hide behind avatars on social media.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech did not envision that more than 50 years later "Go back to Africa" would be screamed at black protesters or that a major presidential candidate would tweet racially charged comments. Some American Christians may be tempted to ignore these issues, hoping they are just a wave of "political incorrectness" that will ebb in due time. That sort of moral silence shortchanges both our gospel and our future.

When many secular Americans think of evangelicals, they think of old, white precinct captains in Iowa or old, white television evangelists and their media empires. But that's not what evangelical Christianity is. Evangelical Christianity is committed to conserving the orthodoxy of the church, is rooted in the authority of the Bible over every competing authority and has a zeal to see people come to Christ by being "born again" through faith in him.

The center of gravity for both orthodoxy and evangelism is not among Anglo suburban evangelicals but among African Anglicans and Asian Calvinists and Latin American Pentecostals. The vital core of American evangelicalism today can be found in churches that are multiethnic and increasingly dominated by immigrant communities.

The next Billy Graham probably will speak only Spanish or Arabic or Persian or Mandarin. American evangelicals often use the language of "revival" -- a word that is sometimes co-opted by politicians to mean a resurgence of a politically useful but watered-down civil religion. A congregation that ignores the global church can deprive itself of revival by overlooking those places where the Spirit is working.

The thriving churches of American Christianity are multigenerational, theologically robust, ethnically diverse and connected to the global church. If Jesus is alive -- and I believe that he is -- he will keep his promise and build his church. But he never promises to do that solely with white, suburban institutional evangelicalism.

The question is whether evangelicals will be on the right side of Jesus. That will mean standing up for the church's future leaders, and for our mission, especially when they are politically powerless. American Christianity faces a test of whether we will identify as Christians first. Majorities come and majorities go. And sometimes a silent majority is too silent for its own good.

The Bible calls on Christians to bear one another's burdens. White American Christians who respond to cultural tumult with nostalgia fail to do this. They are blinding themselves to the injustices faced by their black and brown brothers and sisters in the supposedly idyllic Mayberry of white Christian America. That world was murder, sometimes literally, for minority evangelicals.

This has gospel implications not only for minorities and immigrants but for the so-called silent majority. A vast majority of Christians, on earth and in heaven, are not white and have never spoken English. A white American Christian who disregards nativist language is in for a shock. The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking "foreigner" who is probably not all that impressed by chants of "Make America great again."

Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, is the author of "Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel."